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In late 2008, the Department of Water and Environmental Affairs launched a national Green Drop certification program for all wastewater treatment works (WWTW) in an effort to progressively improve operations so as not to impact negatively on the water bodies into which they discharge their product. However, the Green Drop report has not yet been released and the DA is most concerned that this is primarily due to its shocking content.

It appears, from information currently available to us, that only 32 of South Africa's approximately 970 wastewater treatment works comply with requirements for safe discharge. This equates to a compliance level of just 3%. The consequences of the extremely high levels of pollution in our water bodies are many, varied and serious, but the department keeps delaying the publication of the report. In response to a DA parliamentary question submitted in September last year, the Minister stated: "The Green Drop Report is currently being finalised and the aim is to make it public before the end of November 2009." On 30 November 2009, in an address to the German-South African Business Forum in Munich, the Deputy Minister referred to the Green Drop programme and stated "the Minister has just approved the first report and it will be publicly released soon."

The public has a right to know the extent of how dysfunctional municipal sewage treatment works are, and, more importantly, has a right to demand that the Department make public its plans to address the problems. Reports available on the Department of Water Affairs website (entitled "Municipal Wastewater Treatment, Base Information for Targeted Risk-Based Regulation", and prepared separately for each province during 2009), provide a disturbing overview of the status quo. The table below provides a summary of just a few of the findings:

Province % of WWTWs with non-compliant effluent quality % of WWTWs with flows that are unknown or that exceed design capacity
Free State 99 77
Northern Cape 96 87
Eastern Cape Approximately 89 95
Gauteng Approximately 67 84
Limpopo 95 95
North West 100 95
Western Cape Approximately 19 29
Mpumalanga Approximately 90 89
KwaZulu Natal Approximately 77 50

All sewage treatment works discharge into our rivers and our shores. Reports of pollution of our water bodies frequently feature in the media. We read, last year, of the death of eight people in the Eastern Cape apparently after drinking river water polluted by discharges of untreated domestic sewage. Currently, an East London surfer is demanding that the municipality cover the cost of his medical treatment for infection caused by exposure to faecally-contaminated seawater. An Eastern Cape farmer recently suffered a loss of R16 000 when he was denied permission to sell his milk following bacterial contamination of his milking parlour, apparently caused by the polluted river water used to clean the parlour. A farmer has also reported productivity losses suffered as a result of the constant clogging of his water pumps and irrigation system by algae and weed growing in the polluted, eutrophic river water he is forced to use to irrigate his crops. (Eutrophication is a process in which water bodies receives excess nutrients that stimulate excessive growth algae and water weeds, which could result in water being undrinkable or unusable for irrigation purposes).

The Democratic Alliance calls on the Department to make the Green Drop report public as a matter of urgency, and to outline a sound strategy to address what is clearly a crisis.